"At Least Half" of Police Time Used on Social Media Complaints

The efforts of front-line police to control the masses is moving online, with one police chief suggesting that the majority of police time is now being spent dealing with internet abuse.

According to Chief Constable Alex Marshall from the College of Policing, it's becoming a huge problem. He told the BBC: "As people have moved their shopping online and their communications online, they've also moved their insults, their abuse and their threats online, so I see that it won't be long before pretty much every investigation that the police conduct will have an online element to it."

He expanded on how this works out for the average copper's working day, explaining: "So in a typical day where perhaps they deal with a dozen calls, they might expect that at least half of them, whether around antisocial behaviour or abuse or threats of assault may well relate to social media, Facebook, Twitter or other forms."

An unnamed anonymous policeman suggested a lot of the work is sifting through nonsense, though, with people taking the easy option of calling the police to sort out some internet aggro rather than taking the simpler route of unfollowing or avoiding the person causing the hassle. [BBC]